Visual analysis of perceptual and cognitive processes

The success of visualization techniques depends on their support of perceptual and cognitive processes to perceive the graphically represented information. Apart from measuring accuracy rates of correctly given answers and completion times in user studies, eye tracking experiments provide an additional technique to analyze perceptual and cognitive processes of visual tasks. This paper presents an interdisciplinary approach for studying structures of scan paths by visual means. We propose to annotate graphical elements with semantic information. This annotation allows us to analyze the fixation sequences on these annotated graphical elements with respect to reading processes, visual search strategies, and visual reasoning.